Eighteen Hours Later
by Nicole Anell
Summary: A little bit of BaltarBoomer interaction nonshippy. Set shortly after Resurrection Ship.


**Eighteen Hours Later**

**Nicole Anell**

"Thank gods," says Dr. Baltar with a silent _s_, "you weren't hurt too badly." He says it with a smile -- that odd, semi-sincere smile that Sharon feels like she's seen on TV. He says, "I think we're all about ready to put the Pegasus behind us. Lot of military pomp over nothing. Nothing good anyway." He smiles like there's an anxiety in it, every time. He wants so badly to be _liked._ It's why she doesn't trust him, but also knows he's harmless.

"Yeah?" she says. Eighteen hours after the "attack", with Helo safe and her rib in frakking agony, the bite is coming back into her voice. "And we're putting it behind us how?"

"Hmm, what's that?"

"Last I heard it's the brand new fighting glory of the fleet."

"Well, there is that," he stumbles. "I suppose it is a valuable asset in some ways. Not to worry, though. You're staying right here, of course." He lines up the items from his bag on a table. He never brings marines inside with him. She could probably kill Dr. Baltar, she realizes, and it's just an unspoken fact that she does not. Another small measure of faith they've put in her. He tests a flashlight to shine around her eyes. "The injury is interfering with your exercises, yes? We won't be doing any of those until that wears down. Can't just turn the pain off."

It's a question. Some days he asks her questions -- small ones, maybe calculated ones, and she's not obligated to answer them. "No," she says. "I can't."

"No," he repeats. "Now just what is the use of creating a perfect cybernetic life form that can feel pain and misery? That's what puzzles me."

She follows the flashlight with her eyes. This one she won't answer. The word choice is unsettling. Deep down she's sure there was a Cylon on Pegasus, and she doesn't want to know any more than that.

"Well, as it is, you're a long way from those big nasty chrome things, aren't you?" He would not get away with that another day. Even now her mind spins around ways of kindly telling him to take that kind of condescending "and how are we, little robot?" shit to someone else, but eighteen hours later, she can allow it because Baltar is harmless. He studies her for a moment, the unscientific way. "I really don't have much to check up on today, unless there's something you'd like to tell me."

"Can't think of anything," she shrugs impassively. This thing they do is absurd, and they both know it. He wants to be her psychologist. Interrogator of voluntary information. She rubs her stomach absentmindedly.

He asks her, "May I, Sharon?" with his hand already reaching. His voice is a slight step higher.

She pauses, because she doesn't think he'll wait for permission, but he does. She replies, "Okay, yeah," not really expecting him to go underneath her shirt, but he does that too. His hand sweats a little, making a firm cup over her abdomen. Sharon tells herself it's not a violation, because the last thing she will be is paranoid or intimidated, because then they will win. (But still her stomach twitches, and Baltar makes a noise, so eager to mistake it for a kicking child.)

He asks her, "Had you thought of a name? Had you thought maybe of 'Elisa'?" She isn't obligated to answer.

She says, "Hera."

He speaks haltingly, the way he sometimes does -- "yes" very quietly, staring half-dead, then "yes, that's lovely" a bit too loudly, eyes popping into sudden clarity as his hand jerks away. "Well! Well, let's take another small blood sample and I think we're done, all right?" This thing they do is absurd and harmless, and yet Sharon feels -- not for the first time -- this strange, irrational little chill that she would prefer to keep this baby inside her as long as possible.

She offers her arm and lets him find a vein, sterilize it. She says, "What happened to the last sample?"

"Oh, it's just better to have more for cross-checking things. Actually, there are certain forms of radiological analysis it's gone through that may have produced small chemical alterations, so." He ends the sentence there with a hand-wave, an implied _you understand_. And she does, and it sounds plausible enough. Small measures of faith. He gives her a feigned apologetic look, which she appreciates only today. "This will sting slightly, as you know."

"Do I get candy later?" she says with a tough-girl kind of smirk. She wonders if it's more like something the old Sharon would do. It's like a movie she watched, this little not-Sharon holding her mom's hand in a doctor's office on Troy. She touches her stomach again when the needle pinches. This poor kid is coming into a whole family of weird.

He asks her, "Do you believe in sin?"

It's a bizarre silence-breaker, and it's only because the bruises on her wrists are so fresh that she says "Yes" so quickly and firmly.

He asks, "Why is it that suicide's worse than murder? I mean, do you think it is?" She says nothing, because she's had enough people use her value system to justify their angst this week.

He's still got that off-balance look though, watching her blood fill up the vial. "Or maybe not worse," he mutters on, thinking out loud. "Maybe it's just more finite. As long you stay alive, god's got time to forgive you for anything else."

Sharon tells herself the _s_ is _gods_ is buried by bad grammar, or he's mocking her, or there's something else she doesn't want to know. She says, "Not anything. And it's not like there's a scale..." she stretches out her legs, a little sore eighteen hours later, which is really the only reason she adds, "But okay, sin has degrees. Some are darker than others."

"What's the darkest?" he asks tentatively, not quite looking at her.

She almost ventures a guess like "betrayal" -- which would be more about herself than him, of course, but on a different day she would have said it and watched his eyes, and maybe she'd know. But right now her wrists are red and her rib frakking hurts, so instead she says, "Cruelty for its own sake." He dabs her arm with cotton, gently. She imagines him in his lab, catching a fly with curved paper and letting it safely out the door.


End file.
